Stress assignment in the development of reading aloud: Nonword priming effects on Italian children

Simone Sulpizio, Fondazione De Vincenzi ONLUS

Simone Sulpizio, Department of Cognitive Science and Education, University of Trento

Magali Boureux, Department of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology, University of Verona

Cristina Burani, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies

Chizuru Deguchi, Department of Cognitive Science and Education, University of Trento

Lucia Colombo, Department of General Psychology, University of Padua

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the development of two aspects
related to stress assignment in reading. First, we tested whether the role of
distributional knowledge concerning stress changes with the development of the
reading system; second, we tested whether stress information is computed
independently of phonemic information since the first stages of reading
acquisition. We ran two identical experiments in Italian, one with children of
two age levels (second and fourth grades) and one with adults. Results showed
that older children behave similarly to adults, but younger children do not.
Differently from the advanced readers, younger children use more general
distributional knowledge about stress and are not able to compute stress
information apart from phonemes. Taken together, our results suggest that the
stress subsystem, and in particular the mechanisms working at the level of the
phonological buffer are not fully developed during the first stages of
reading.